


by any other name

by sure sure (getoffmysheets)



Series: Red in Tooth and Claw [3]
Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Daemon Feels, Daemon Separation, Daemon Touching, Gen, Harm to Daemons, Past Child Abuse, Same-Sex Daemons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-11-27 21:13:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20954990
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getoffmysheets/pseuds/sure%20sure
Summary: What do you call such a thing, when it's shape is such a horrifying taboo?"Hello there, sweetheart."





	by any other name

**Author's Note:**

> I'll fill this whole fandom with father-daughter fics that don't have a goddamn thing to do with Mike. I'll do it. Don't make me.

When he sees Owens glance up, Hopper nearly thinks that somehow one of those Demodogs has snuck up on them. But he hears Andy murmur “It’s alright, Eleven” as he starts wrapping his belt around Owens’ leg.

Owens is the color of chalk as the red warning lights illuminate the contours of Eleven’s face and Hopper realizes it’s not the blood loss when he whispers, “It’s _you_. Dear god…”

Eleven stands motionless for a moment, a hand reaching out to hang onto the thick ruff of fur across Andy’s back – with gloves on, because she’s trying not to be a distraction for them while they’re down here. “You have something of mine,” she says flatly, with such a penetrating stare that even Hopper feels uncomfortable. “I want it back.”

“I wasn’t- I didn’t-” Owens says weakly, crying out when Hopper puts unnecessary pressure on his wound. His daemon, some kind of squirrel, turns circles on floor beside his hip. She’s pulled patches of fur out of her tail at Owens’ distress, but seems calmer now.

“Number 11, like me,” El tells him, seemingly nonsensical. “Sister told me you still have her. A, B, C – but Number 11, like me.”

“We didn’t know she was yours,” the squirrel daemon squeaks, her tail twitching wildly. She can’t seem to sit still, inexplicably agitated by the sight of Eleven. “We didn’t know she was _anyone’s_. She-she didn’t…we couldn’t give her back to you – she couldn’t even tell us who you were. They called her ‘_K’_.”

Andy murmurs, “The eleventh letter in the alphabet.”

Hopper stands quickly as he finishes putting the tourniquet in place, too angry and nauseated to do more than grunt “_Where_?”

Owens fumbles through his coat, handing him a keyring. “In the bottom of this stairwell is an emergency exit door. It’s fake – that floor is where they kept the experimental children’s daemons. Use that white key – K is the only one left down there, third room on your right.”

As calm as Hopper tries to seem, Andy snarls, snapping her teeth at thin air, fur bristling along her back. El absently pets down her side, but her mind is clearly on what’s living beneath them. He often wonders if Eleven has noticed that Andraste’s teeth are much too large for an ordinary birddog or if the notion simply hasn’t occurred to her yet. If like the town of Hawkins, she will pretend not to notice, or if like the Byers family, she will just accept it as a fact of existence.

Eleven pulls off her gloves and curls her fingers through Andy’s fur as they reach the fake emergency door, hands shaking. _“I am going to be whole.”_

“You’re whole right now, El,” Andy tells her loyally. “You just aren’t _together_.”

Her lower lip trembles.

Down the hall, there is a horrible noise, a sound unlike anything Hopper’s ever heard in his life – a baying, ear-splitting howl that transforms midway through into the agonized screams of a little girl.

Andy hackles again, moving to protect Eleven, but El darts past her toward the sound and a terrible suspicion begins forming in them. With a grasping hand, El rips the door from the hinges, hurling it away down the hall and darting inside just as they reach her. Hopper looks inside to confront the deeply disturbing sight that waits for them…

…and finds his worst suspicions confirmed, her haunted little face staring up at him from the embrace of Eleven’s arms. Andy whispers, “Oh, _Eleven_.”

She is identical to El in every single way – the only thing separating the human from the daemon are their clothes. Locked in chains around her wrists and neck, she has been given the barest covering over her body. Hopper refuses, even mentally, to address her as ‘K’. Parent daemons name their children after gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, legendary kings and queens. Names which they hope to reflect the glory of the child’s spirit.

They gave her nothing but a bare letter, the lowest attempt of address possible.

Both girls shake uncontrollably as they cling together. The daemon keeps attempting to speak, but either doesn’t possess enough words or enough composure to manage a complete sentence. “I’m- we- I- can’t- ”

El makes a little displeased sound and pushes her fingers on the collar, releasing the restraints on her. Her skin is bruised deeply beneath it, and Andy lets out a distressed whine.

She shrinks back from them, Hopper and Andy frozen in the doorway, and El says “Jim” as though that’s an explanation in and of itself. Perhaps it is.

“Jim,” she repeats, chin wobbling slightly.

He can’t take it, he can’t look at her crying with Eleven’s haunted eyes and vulnerable face and do nothing. But what do you call such a thing, when she's never been given a real name? When her shape is such a horrifying taboo?

“Hello there, sweetheart,” he says quietly, holding out a hand for her to take.

“Sweet…heart…” she says, uncomprehending, still half-hiding against Eleven.

“Yeah, baby.” She’s an abomination – daemons are _never_ supposed to look like humans – but all he can keep thinking about is how isolated and confused she must’ve been, to end up looking like this. And they would’ve tormented her all the more for it, for her inability to understand herself and the world around her.

“You touch,” Eleven tells her. “Like this.”

She kneels and rubs Andy’s ears and Hopper stands there, jaw tight, and radiates his love out to her like the midday sun. It’s all she should feel, it’s all he ever wants her to feel again.

Her daemon sobs loudly, wretched with her elven face and enormous wounded eyes and her purple-bruised wrists. Eleven looks bewildered, anxious, and Hopper pulls her daemon against him, cradling her delicate skull. “It’s alright, baby, you’re okay.”

“Miss you!” she cries in her broken English, her terror and loneliness washing through him in slowly ebbing waves. “Miss you!”

“Oh, baby, I know. I know it,” he tells her. “I missed you, too.”

To Eleven, he says “We’ll-we’ll find a way to explain two of you. Identical twins or something.”

Eleven shakes her head. She looks at her daemon and points at Andy. “Doggy?”

It’s a question rather than a statement, and the daemon girl nods. Hopper is left gaping at a lemon and white colored beagle, with a pink nose and wagging tail. “This?”

El picks her up and cuddles her close. “My dog!”

The beagle daemon whines happily and licks at her face, getting El to laugh. Hopper loves her so much it’s almost physically painful. Losing Sarah broke him. Losing El too would destroy him forever.

In the lift, El returns her grip on his hand and Andraste stands crouched over the little beagle, her too large teeth bared at the darkness around them. As El begins weaving the Gate back together, they see an enormous shadow shifting behind the portal, like a yolk in an egg sac, thrashes around in displeasure.

Teeth bared, Andy says “Get ready, Jim.”

“Ready if you are, Andraste.”

A dark, steady flow of blood pours from El’s nose, first from one, and then both nostrils. A dark tendril of shadows crawls out, reaching toward her.

“Jim!” Andy warns, tearing into a Demodog before it can get into the cage.

El is throwing out her power with both hands, trying to banish the Mindflayer back into the Upside Down. But then the beagle grows. And grows. And grows again. “Not that! Not that!”

Until she is first a wolf. And then a little girl. And then a grown woman, with wild waves of hair and an elven face. She stands behind El and flings up her arms and they roar a wordless challenge at the all-consuming shadow trapped within the Upside Down, dissolving the smoke and shadows.

The Gate is woven together, stitched up like a torn shirt, and Hopper catches El as she wobbles and falls, still staring at the face of her daemon, who looks like the woman El will one day become.

The daemon woman bows her head, hiding her face in the curtain of her hair, folded up in the corner of the lift. Her white skin is still vibrant with bruises. “Sorry,” she murmurs, curling up into herself. “Sorry.”

“You did good, kid,” Hopper tells them both. “You did so good.”

Andy plants herself against the daemon’s side, too large to be moved. The woman hiccups and hugs her around the neck.

\---

On the trip back to the cabin, Andy finally says what’s been on their mind. “She needs a name, Eleven.”

“K?” both of them say, in the same uncertain tone.

“No,” Andy says firmly, echoing Hopper’s angry thought. “Your soul is not a letter.”

Eleven and the daemon stare at each other. In that uncertain tone, she asks, “Not K?”

El shrugs. “Not K. Name?”

“Pick one,” Hopper says, trying to sound encouraging. “Anything you want.”

His mom’s daemon named Andraste after the Iceni goddess of war, but he figured Eleven was entitled to give her daemon any damn name she liked.

But El looks unhappy and shakes her head. “Don’t know. Don’t know…names.”

“Brigantia.” It comes out before he can stop himself and Hopper clears his throat, glancing at the daemon and her timid little face. As timid as she looked, they would never forget her ferocity defending Eleven. Part of them even suspected that grown up war goddess was her true form, her real nature hidden away for El’s convenience. Gruffly, he says, “What do you think of Brigantia?”

El didn’t know much about names, but she did know that your parents picked them. That the air rippled with some kind of power, the way Hopper said it. She laced her fingers through her daemon’s, who gave her a tentative smile. “My name?”

“Yes," El says, leaning into her. "That's yours." 

**Author's Note:**

> Daemons mentioned here:  
Andraste "Andy" - Hopper's daemon, a Chesapeake Bay retriever. Means 'invincible, unconquerable'. In Celtic mythology, this was the goddess of war, worshiped by the Iceni tribe.  
Brigantia - Eleven's daemon, unsettled. Means 'the exalted one', even 'strength, force'. In Celtic mythology, this was a goddess of victory, worshiped by the Romano-British. She was later associated with the Roman goddess Victoria, and the Irish Brighid. The Brigante tribe in northeast Britain were likely named after her.


End file.
